Scrum to the Left of Me, Kanban to the Right, Here I am Stuck in the Middle with You

There seems to be some confusion (not to mention strong opinions!) about when to use Scrum vs. when to use Kanban. At times purists on either side have drawn the lines and set up camp in an almost warlike approach, making it difficult to wade across the middle battlefield of information without stepping on metaphorical land mines or getting peppered with judgemental opinions, rhetorical quips or social media blasts.

In this session I will compare and contrast Scrum and Kanban, share perspectives, dispel myths, and provide an attendee with some balanced, useful, practical, and actionable guidance on what options may exist. The goal of this session is to create a neutral zone of transparency under the Agile umbrella where rational thinking may preside, where we can all get along like good little collaborative Agilists, and where we can identify meaningful actions to help move our teams and organizations ahead on their respective paths to Agility.

In summary, show it is possible for “Scrum AND Kanban” to coexist.

Background Information: I will be pulling from my experience teaching and coaching Scrum and Kanban over the last 10+ years to over 3000 people on over 250 teams in dozens of organizations, and I will be polling the attendees for their issues and validations.

schedule 3 weeks ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

As leaders at any level of the organization, we sometimes make mistakes that break the trust we’re trying to build, especially when trying to introduce changes. In this interactive session, we’ll explore the kinds of behaviours that build or break trust and introduce a model for rebuilding relationships when trust is broken. We’ll use LEGO Serious Play to examine some real scenarios and consider how trust can be rebuilt (or further undermined!). You’ll leave with insights into how to foster trust in your organization and practical ideas about how you can grow as a leader.

Carlos Oliveira - The Power of Design Sprints for Product Teams

schedule 2 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.

As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.

Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

schedule 1 month ago

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,* process, and* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

Fernando Cuenca - From Team Flow to System Flow to Customer Flow: Practical Tools to Keep Valuable Work Moving

schedule 1 month ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

"Early and continuous delivery of value" is one of the promises of a shift towards Agile, and one of the manifestations of that principle is the ability to keep work in a state of "flow": always smoothly moving and reaching its Customers. Flow can be observed (and managed) at multiple levels, but the flow that really matters is that which is perceived by the Customer.

This talk will explore the meaning of "flow" at various levels (teams, systems of teams, and end-to-end Customer workflows), and the practical techniques organizations can apply to move from one level to the next, and as they do so, streamline and smooth out delivery of value to their Customers.

Alex Orchard - Supporting Mental Health with (Agile) Teams

schedule 2 weeks ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Mental Health is a rising concern across our society, one which workplaces are now starting to grapple with the impact of. How does our work affect us, and how can building strong teams support our mental health?

schedule 1 month ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

Jade Salazaar - Future Cities & 5G: Design Thinking Workshop

schedule 1 month ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

What is design thinking? Is it only for designers? Can I benefit from it?

Design Thinking in its simplest form, is an approach to solving problems. Once you understand the core principles and framework, you can apply it to just about anything. In the enterprise, it asks for cross-functional teams to come together to co-ideate and co-create products and experiences that are centred around the end-user.

Join the Rogers digital team for an immersive workshop as we use design thinking, to explore and create the ideal smart city with 5G technology. By the end of the session, you will have observed, defined, created, and tested your new city. Then, we will reflect on how you can use the principles in your day-to day work supporting and advancing agile practices and adoption.

schedule 1 month ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

David Sabine - The Agile Art of Documentation

schedule 1 month ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Myth: "Agile teams don't document."Truth: Some of the best documentation we've ever seen comes from Agile teams.

Agile Engineering practices have revolutionized the ways in which documentation is treated and produced. In high-stakes environments with heavy compliance and audit requirements, a dangerous tendency toward exhaustive documentation is common. This workshop provides direct guidance and simple tools to help a document-heavy workplace think differently about documentation.

I have developed this workshop to help an organization reframe their understanding of documentation with respect to knowledge work in complex environments so that they may eliminate unnecessary artifacts and simplify/automate others.

Shahin Sheidaei - It All Starts with a Question, a Powerful One!

schedule 1 month ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. The easiest way to have a two-way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful conversation. They are usually thought-provoking and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful Questions, if asked in the right tone and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say! Don't you agree?

Dave Sharrock - What Darth Vader, Qui-Gon Jinn and Luke Skywalker can teach us about leadership

schedule 3 weeks ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

The Star Wars universe provides many examples from which to learn about leadership. It's obvious that Darth Vader's leadership style lacks that special something, while Yoda’s leadership style captures something closer to what we might consider to be the quintessential agile leader.

Real leadership is more complicated than the black and white of Darth Vader or Yoda. It is a combination of how we behave and the organizational structure and culture within which we lead. At any one time, the our behaviour is one factor in many that contribute to the effectiveness of us as a leader. Leadership effectiveness depends on organizational structure, how leadership teams are formed, how information it's shared and what decisions need to be made. Culture plays a role, with different cultures responding to different leadership styles.

During this workshop, we will use the Star Wars universe to introduce five leadership archetypes. Each archetype describes a specific behaviour, and is often associated with a unique leadership structure. Understanding these different archetypes gives us a language with which to evaluate and grow our leadership skills. It allows us to be contextually aware of our surroundings and to choose the leadership behaviours best suited to a given situation.

schedule 4 weeks ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

A dōjō (道場) is a hall or space for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development (and now also Agile Coaching!).

It will be a space for the immersive practice of coaching. Imagine a place where you can come and try out new coaching techniques, get feedback, give feedback and learn from your successes and failures? This is what coaching dōjō is about!

Coaching is one of the four main skills of every Agile Coach (along mentoring, teaching and facilitating) and for many of us coaching is the hardest skill to master. Way too often we go back to the mentoring mode, giving pieces of advice and sharing our points of view. Guess what, asking questions and giving space to reflect and come up with actions is hard, it's extremely hard! That's why we want to create a space for deliberate practice of coaching.

The coaching dōjō will be very to the Code Katas exercises knows from the software development world. We will come together, work in groups of 3s, one person will be a coach, one will be a coachee and one will be an observer. We will run 3 rounds of 10-15 minutes coaching so everyone will get a chance to be a coach. At the end of the round, the coach will hear feedback from the coachee and from the observer. In every session (this will be the 1st one) we will work with different challenges and/or different coaching techniques.

Brock Argue / Erkan Kadir - Get Buy-in Now!

schedule 3 weeks ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Have you ever struggled to gain buy-in from your boss, a stakeholder or an executive for a key direction or product decision? Do you have good ideas, but find that no one is listening? In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn how to meet executives on their level, build rapport by using their language, and create an elevator pitch to gain buy-in for your ideas. You'll leave this workshop with a strategy to analyze stakeholder needs, a formula that lays out information in a way that grabs and keeps executive attention, an elevator pitch you can use in your work and an action plan for delivering your pitch successfully.

Mihail Sestakov / Teri Christian - Launching Teams: A Workshop

schedule 2 months ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

schedule 4 weeks ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Whether you are growing an organization or transforming an existing one, you must create a structure that will drive the culture of continuous learning, value creation, and performance to compete in the modern world. Scrum@Scale combines the experience of Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) and many trainers and practitioners around the world. It's a Scale-Free architecture that allows you to apply Scrum to an entire organization without unnecessary overhead.

Mishkin Berteig - Launching an Agile Team with the Skills Matrix

schedule 1 month ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Participants learn the “Skills Matrix” technique for getting a new Agile team started and for getting established teams to leap to the next level of capability. This technique has been used for decades at Toyota to create a team development plan in a collaborative, visual way.

Mishkin Berteig - JIRA is the Worst Possible Choice

schedule 3 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

schedule 4 weeks ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

One of the first actions organizations follow after deciding to jump into an agile transformation is assembling an agile team. To come with the "team" a hiring process begins. The hiring managers rush to pick the people following a generic profile of the ideal members.

After some time the selected candidate decides to leave you earlier than expected, generating high levels of stress across the project to was he/she was allocated. In other cases the organization is “forced” to keep the person as part of the team even though the performance of the employee is not the desired because of the person’s replacement process can be very complex.

In this workshop, we will share some tips to find the “perfect fit” for your organization. Furthermore, we will learn the power of asking the right questions at the right time so that your organization can get the right fit for your team.

Join us and learn how to improve your hiring process and start enjoying the benefits of finding the right people in your organization.

schedule 1 month ago

60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Your mind is like this water my friend, when it is agitated it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.

Master Oogway (Kung-Fu Panda)

When should you coach? When should you teach? And when should you mentor? It’s not always easy to recognize that you probably play different roles with your teams, let alone knowing when and how to switch between them purposefully.

In this session, we will help you consciously recognize the various coaching stances and which stance is appropriate for a given situation. You will practice stepping into the stances and moving between them using coaching katas that model situations you probably see all the time in your companies.

Attendees will leave this session with greater self-awareness of their coaching style, practice working within the various stances, and techniques they can practice to further enhance the agility of their coaching. This focus on understanding our internal thinking leads perfectly into the next session that focuses further outwards on making observations, separating out what we see versus how we interpret what we see.